


Summer of Love

by alouette_des_champs



Series: Gritty She-boot [3]
Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Adopting a plant together is third base for lesbians, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Anxiety, Drug Addiction, Established Relationship, Explicit Sexual Content, F/F, Fluff, Motorcycles, Recovery, Shower Sex, Yoga
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-23
Updated: 2020-04-23
Packaged: 2021-03-01 20:41:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,833
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23653258
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alouette_des_champs/pseuds/alouette_des_champs
Summary: Perfuma receives a gift she can't keep, rides on the back of a motorcycle without a helmet, and learns to take her own advice.
Relationships: Huntara/Perfuma (She-Ra)
Series: Gritty She-boot [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1683196
Comments: 17
Kudos: 70





	Summer of Love

**Author's Note:**

> What up my shut-ins? Still in your houses? Fun! Dope! Cool! Love that for us!
> 
> I am frankly shocked, astonished, and offended that more hasn't been written for this ship. I wanted to go less plot-heavy with this one, so it's a little more compact. It was supposed to be a quick, easy write for me, but then I got into some E M O T I O N S and it took forever. Still in the same world, obviously, but again can stand on its own.
> 
> One jam this time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83ExRzEHtjU

If you wanted to have a positive outlook, the first thing you had to do was come to terms with the fact that the world was a terrible place.

One of the biggest mistakes people tended to make on the journey to positivity was trying to forget or block out all the negatives, but that wasn’t healthy and it just didn’t work. Sooner or later, the bad things would claw their way past your defenses. You had to look directly at them and then decide that you were going to be positive anyway. You had to confront your personal flaws and embrace them if you wanted to change them. You had to stand up in the face of all your trauma and pain and accept it radically, unconditionally.

Perfuma wasn’t quite there yet, but that was what she told her students.

Three days a week, she taught Intro to Yoga at the community center to a group of people ranging in age from ten to seventy. They were home-schooled kids looking for a gym class activity, stay-at-home moms, retirees, college kids, and outpatients from a few different treatment programs, mandated to choose between yoga and an art therapy group. They usually picked yoga because they didn’t have to talk about their feelings as much.

This patchwork group was her favorite even though they weren’t as skilled as the students in her more advanced classes. They didn’t like her as much, either; in fact, some of them clearly found her very annoying. Even so, there was something magical about the experience of watching them grow. Most of the time, they didn’t even learn anything from her; they found something inside themselves that they could use, something they hadn’t known they were carrying, something they needed. Perfuma liked to think that she was helping people in the same way she had been helped once.

Did she think that reiki and yoga and crystals and meditation and astrology and homeopathy _worked?_ Maybe not in the same way that Western medicine worked. The paramedics had not used a Tibetan singing bowl to bring her back from the brink of death for the fifth time on the blue winter morning that she had decided to change her life. On the other hand, there was nothing in Western medicine that had helped her actually change once she’d been resuscitated and booted out of then hospital in favor of someone more deserving.

The first thing she’d done was get a houseplant. Taking care of the little spider plant every day had reminded her to take care of herself, to get up, brush her teeth, and go to the methadone clinic. If she went off on a bender or ended up in the hospital or died, then the plant would die, too. She just couldn’t bear that thought. One plant turned into three turned into five turned into a whole room full of plants that depended on her careful attention for their survival.

Methadone had stopped her from withdrawing, but it was the emotional wreckage that was really dangerous. It didn’t matter how normal you felt physically if you hated yourself, so she had started looking for ways to _not_ hate herself. She had left home at seventeen with vague, utopian ideas about freedom, love, and kindness, so she gravitated towards circles that shared those values, this time with less hardcore narcotics and more essential oils. She surrounded herself with people who _liked_ her, who didn’t think she was stupid or idealistic. They always told her she was too sensitive, that she would feel less anxious if she took a step back, but she couldn’t help it. Even after she began to heal, she still felt other people’s pain as acutely as she felt her own. She worried about her friends. She worried about strangers. She knew how easy it was to fall down a rabbit hole; everything looked like a catastrophe waiting to happen from where she was standing.

She felt lucky to have someone in her life who could drag her out of that spiral. She only had one major complaint about her current relationship: it was hard to maintain concentration during her morning meditation when she could feel someone watching her. You didn’t need to open your third eye to be able to be able to tell when you were being ogled.

“Clear your mind of all earthly desires,” Perfuma said evenly, cracking one eye open.

Huntara was sprawled on the pastel loveseat on the other side of the room, flagrantly ignoring Perfuma’s guidance on proper posture for deep breathing. She looked more prepared to play a pickup game than to meditate, dressed in an ancient t-shirt with the sides cut out, a sports bra, and some basketball shorts. Her pale hair was slung back in a ponytail, the sides shaved in a somewhat uneven undercut that she had done herself. She still didn’t seem to understand what she was supposed to be doing during meditation despite multiple in-depth explanations; even so, whenever she stayed the night, she would get up early without complaint. She sat still and silent for as long as Perfuma did even though she had long ago been given a pass to skip out and stay in bed.

“How do you it already isn’t?” Huntara asked, narrowing her eyes.

The corner of her mouth quirked up as her eye drifted closed again. “I can feel you looking at me.”

The sound of a stifled laugh accompanied Perfuma back into meditation.

When they’d met, Huntara had been relatively new to town. She was the loudest and rudest of Adora’s loud, rude gym friends. It was hard to get on Perfuma’s bad side; she intentionally practiced boundless empathy for all living creatures, but that did not mean that you could make all living creatures return your good vibes. She’d been sure that the other woman didn’t like her, maybe even hated her, until one night when they had wound up the only two people sober in a room full of their wasted friends. It was hard not to talk to the only other person who could still form complete sentences. Bow still claimed that he had “wing-manned” her when in fact all he had done was pass out with most of his upper body draped across her lap so that she couldn’t get up and leave.

She hadn’t been in the market for a relationship at the time, but as she often told her students, sometimes you find something right when you stop looking for it. She had never been one to turn down a gift from the universe.

Perfuma did her best to center herself again, but it was a lost cause. After a few minutes, she closed her meditation, took a cleansing breath, then stood up from where she had been sitting in lotus position on her yoga mat. She swept across the room in her sundress and made herself comfortable in Huntara’s lap, cupping her jaw with both hands. She did not open her eyes despite the fact that Perfuma’s face was inches away from hers.

“Excuse me, princess. My mind is clear of all earthly desires right now. I was actually in the middle of communing with the earth.”

“I’m so sorry to interrupt,” she said with a giggle. “What was the earth telling you?”

“It was showing me the future; the image was blurry, but it looked kind of like a hot blonde sitting in my lap.” She finally opened her eyes, blinking as if she had just seen a bright light. 

“I always say that it’s amazing what you can learn when you open your mind to the wisdom of Mother Earth.” Perfuma leaned in for a kiss, just long and deep enough that her heart picked up from the slow, contemplative beat of meditation. The other woman wrapped her arms around her waist, pulling their bodies flush.

“I got you a present,” she said when they finally broke apart for air. “I was going to give it to you last night, but I got, y’know…distracted.”

This was unexpected. She didn’t know what to say. They didn’t really give one another gifts, but Perfuma’s birthday _was_ coming up that weekend, as Bow kept reminding her. He had appointed himself head party planner in their friend group; if you didn’t specify what you wanted to do for your birthday, then you would end up doing what _Bow_ wanted. She was going to have to take him for coffee and talk him into letting her have a nice, quiet picnic in the park.

Huntara scooted her off her lap and onto the loveseat. “Be right back. Close your eyes.”

Perfuma closed her eyes gamely, feeling strangely nervous. A moment later, her footsteps returned, and the cushion dipped as Huntara sat down. Something cool and smooth touched her hand. She recognized the shape and texture of the object as she wrapped her palms around it: it was a terracotta flowerpot, a tiny one.

“This was supposed to be your birthday present, but to be honest, I didn’t think I could take care of it for that long. Even though I’m not welcome back in the Southwestern United States, I thought I’d get you a little piece of the culture.” Huntara told the story of her escape from the place she had been born with a lot of unlikely embellishments and many of the details intentionally obscured, but Perfuma didn’t pry. She wouldn’t have wanted anyone to press her for details about her own life. She would tell her the whole truth when she was ready, hopefully including who, exactly, had forbidden her to set foot in the desert ever again.

Perfuma opened her eyes. Inside the flower pot, there was a little ball-shaped cactus, dusky green with long spines. It was almost impossibly adorable.

“This is _so_ sweet. I love it.” She teared up almost immediately, torn between gratitude and dread. This was not the first cactus she had owned even though there was a conspicuous lack of succulents in her apartment at the moment. Her other plants thrived on her relentless mothering, but all that attention killed a cactus faster than you could Google _why is my cactus turning brown?_ Sometimes caring for something meant taking care of it in the way it needed to be taken care of, not the way you wanted to take care of it; that was another lesson she was good at teaching but bad at actually learning for herself.

The other woman could tell there was a _but_ trailing after her statement even though she hadn’t said it out loud. She studied her face, perplexed. “What’s wrong?”

Perfuma was terrible at keeping a secret. She couldn’t hold it in. “Cacti are the only type of plant I can’t keep alive,” she blurted. 

Huntara threw her head back and laughed. She sounded relieved, as if she had expected the problem to be much more serious. “They’re supposed to be the easiest!” 

“For people who are _bad_ at taking care of plants!” 

“So let me see if I have this straight: you’re saying you’re going to murder this cute little cactus because you’re _too good_ at plant care?”

“They just need less attention than other species…I smother them.” She ducked her head, but Huntara lifted her chin so that she could look her in the eye.

“C’mon, I’m just fucking with you. I will _not_ take it personally if you accidentally love that thing to death.”

“I’ll feel really guilty about it, though.”

“How about I keep it at my place, then? I can ignore it all day, every day. You can remind me to water it once a month or whatever. Split custody.”

Perfuma pulled her into a tight hug, not trusting herself to speak without crying. She was used to feeling her emotions deeply, but they were usually negative emotions to be ridden out or otherwise managed. There were bursts of joy, of course, love and inspiration and togetherness, but for the most part, she was fighting what seemed like an endless battle against paralyzing anxiety. It was easy to get hooked on a good feeling; she was naturally wary of anything that felt too perfect. But this was something she had helped to build. It felt stable; maybe she could put her weight on it without breaking it. 

She had to get ready to go to work, but because it was important to be able to accept the support of your loved ones, she graciously accepted some help with her shower. 

The human body was natural and beautiful in all its endless variation, but she had some reservations about her own. For most of her adult life, Perfuma had preferred out-of-body experiences to physical ones, astral-projecting her way out of any unpleasant situation. The problem was that after a while, you stopped being able to choose. You were going to miss all the good along with the bad. She had to exist in the body she had been given, the one she had destroyed and then tried to put back together again. It was not an easy place to live. She had the fading scars of track marks on the insides of her arms, an embarrassing tattoo on her ankle that she didn’t remember getting done, some Chinese character that probably didn’t actually mean anything, innumerable other marks and imperfections that were somehow certainly her fault…

Huntara had almost immediately blown past everything she saw as a major flaw with the same bullheadedness she brought to everything she did. It didn’t feel like flattery, either, even though she was certainly capable of flattery. It felt more honest than that when her hands lingered on her hips, skin water-slippery, her thumbs pressing over the sharp points of her hipbones, when she bent her head to tease her nipple to a peak with her tongue. She was still always a little surprised by how gently she kissed her; it was perhaps one of the only ways a terribly irreverent person could think to express reverence.

Perfuma liked the fact that the other woman was stronger than her. Realistically, Huntara could do whatever she wanted to her, but she wouldn’t. The idea that someone who had poured so much time and effort into becoming physically powerful could be soft for her was almost intimidatingly sexy. She liked to trace the sharp relief of muscle wherever she found it, the ridges of her shoulders, the plane of her stomach, the definition of her biceps. She had a pin-up tattoo on the outside of her arm, a seductive girl in a bustier framed by a skull motif. Perfuma used to think it was crass, but now that she had spent a lot more time looking at it and getting to know the person it was inked on, she had changed her mind. She had changed her mind about a lot of things.

One of the fringe benefits of maintaining a daily yoga practice was increased flexibility. It hadn’t done her a lot of good when she had been single, but now she was finding it very useful. Case in point: she could get her foot up onto the hip-level soap shelf in her shower without slipping. A shampoo bottle went flying and clattered against the drain, but she barely noticed. Huntara held her firmly in place with her shoulder blades against the tile wall, one strong arm braced around her lower back, as she curled two fingers inside of her. The fiery burst of satisfaction made her weak in the knees. She wanted to grind down into her palm, but she couldn’t move as fluidly as she wanted to; all she could manage was a few feeble twitches of her hips. 

“Hold still,” she said with a chuckle, tightening her arm around her waist. Her breath was maddeningly warm against the cool, damp skin of her neck, and her lips were even hotter. “I got you.” She pressed her thumb over her clit, sending a jolt through her every time she moved her hand. It didn’t take long before she was digging her nails into her shoulder, a breathy moan sneaking out of her mouth while she was good and distracted by her body seizing up around a strong current of pleasure.

“I don’t know if I can get my leg down without falling over,” she admitted sheepishly after a moment. 

“This is going to be fun to explain to an ER doctor,” Huntara replied. She did her best to dislodge her foot from the shelf while still supporting her upper body; it took a little maneuvering, but she got both feet back on the ground without incident. 

“Let’s get out of here before we figure out another creative way to tear someone’s goddamn ACL,” she said, reaching for the faucet. Huntara always found a way to communicate to her whether or not she wanted to be touched. Maybe someday, she would be able to tell Perfuma directly, but until then, she was good at reading between the lines. Being taken care of in any way and not being allowed to reciprocate had been hard for her to accept at first; she was a giver by nature. She’d had to get creative, to find other ways to give.

Perfuma stepped out of the shower and grabbed a couple of towels from the shelf above the sink. She wrapped one around her own head to keep her hair from dripping everywhere and brandished the other like a bullfighter’s red cape.

“Now _you_ hold still,” she said sternly. The other woman only grumbled a little, a sure sign that she was going to willingly cooperate. Perfuma rubbed the towel vigorously over her hair, then giggled at her murderous expression when she pulled it away from her face. “Sorry.” She passed it more gently over her shoulders and chest, and she felt her relax a little. She was thorough, getting the backs of her legs and under her arms, making the most of the time she would allow her to fuss over her. When she was finished, she kissed her on the cheek.

“All done. You’re free.”

On her way out of the bathroom, she caught a glimpse of the clock hung on her wall beside a hanging pot of ivy. She groaned. “I’m going to be _so_ late.” She immediately began a frantic search for clothes while Huntara got dressed at an annoyingly leisurely pace, throwing on a pair of jeans and a shirt. She had to find a sports bra, a pair of clean yoga pants, a tank top, a sweater, a jacket, a pair of socks, a headband…not to mention the ten minutes she was going to have to spend in front of the mirror wrestling with her hair. She had put it in a bun for the shower, but it was still half-damp, half-dry, and therefore even frizzier than usual; a scrunchie could only do so much heavy lifting.

“Let me drive you,” Huntara said, tossing her keys in the air and catching them.

Perfuma glanced out of the window, where she could see her motorcycle parked at the curb in front of her building. She had avoided riding on it up until this point. She had not been much of a risk-taker since taking risks had ruined several years of her life. But it was the only way she was going to be anywhere close to on time, and now seemed a good a time as any to face her fears. “Only if you promise not to go too fast.”

“That’s the fun part.” She laughed at the dirty look Perfuma threw over her shoulder. “I’m just kidding! I’ll follow the speed limit. Promise.”

She grabbed her bag and followed her out of the apartment and down to the street. Huntara carefully wrapped the little cactus in a bandanna she pulled out of her back pocket put it in the saddlebag before threw her leg over the sleek black frame of her motorcycle. Perfuma cautiously climbed on behind her. It felt kind of secure with her chest pressed right up against the other woman’s back, her arms wrapped tight around her waist, but not as secure as she would have liked; there was seemingly nothing keeping her from flying off the back other than her own grip. 

Adrenaline lit her up as Huntara started the deafening engine and pulled away from the curb. She squeezed her eyes closed, her face buried in the back of Huntara’s jacket. If it weren’t for the air rushing past her and the noise, she almost could have been sitting still. It was a far cry from the terrifying G-force she had been imagining. After a moment, she turned her head to the side and cracked one eye open.

Trees streamed by in a tapestry of green and gold. Cars and people were blurs of sound and color, there and gone against the constant blue backdrop of the sky. Perfuma found herself relaxing her arms a little, her heart slowing to a manageable cadence. Maybe they _weren’t_ going to die a horrible flaming death. The sense of imminent danger she felt mingled with a strangely cozy feeling. It was almost like the two of them were in their own world, one that moved at a different speed from the one they had left behind, untouchable. To Huntara’s credit, she obeyed the speed limit more fastidiously than she probably obeyed any law in her entire life; she even slowed down for turns. By the time they pulled into the parking lot of the community center, she was wondering why she had ever been afraid in the first place.

Huntara helped her climb off the bike; her legs were only shaking a little bit.

“Well?” she asked expectantly. “What do you think?”

“That was fun,” Perfuma said brightly, trying and failing to tame her hair, which had now been fatally exposed to both water and wind in the same hour. “But we’re getting helmets.” Huntara made a face like she was about to protest.

“Let me rephrase that: if you want me to ride with you again, then we’re getting helmets.”

A smile spread over her face slowly. “You drive a hard bargain, princess.”

“I want a cute one with flowers on it.” She leaned up for a goodbye kiss and headed into the building with a wave over her shoulder. 

Intro to Yoga went about as smoothly as it ever did, with some of the less enthusiastic students exchanging wry glances during her mantra of affirmations and one poor kid somehow managing to fall on his face and break his glasses in downward-facing dog. When she checked her phone between classes, she’d gotten a text from Huntara. It was a picture of her hand holding out a hot pink motorcycle helmet.

_no flowers sry ur gonna have to settle for pink_

**Author's Note:**

> Follow me on Twitter @prettyalouettey and explain to me how to take care of a cactus because I can't do it either like what do they want from me??? My blood????


End file.
